Integrating social media into the marketing mix

: the determinants of success

Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how three different companies (Starbucks, Walmart and Hewlett-Packard) are integrating Social Media into their marketing mix. How Social Media is a changing trend and why it is becoming essential for companies to adopt it as a marketing strategy in order to gain competitive advantage. The main Social Media Platforms that will be analysed are; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. The literature review encompasses many different academic researchers’ and allows for the integration of ideas, opinions and insights on the importance of being active in Social Media, Social Media benefits, drawbacks and challenges, the analysis of Social Media data, and how to develop a Social Media strategy by providing guidelines. The conceptual framework is a honeycomb framework of seven building blocks, which is then used to highlight the importance of these different components in each case study. It is used to describe how each company can use different set of tools to position themselves, depending on their overall objectives. The case studies present an overview of each company and describe its main benefits, drawbacks and what each enterprise should adopt as a set of Social Media guidelines. The managerial benefits of discussing these cases will allow to comprehensively evaluate the trade-offs of integrating distinct Social Media tools into a company’s overall marketing mix. In the teaching notes, the main learning objectives, suggested assignment questions and respective answers are presented. Finally, the conclusions, limitations and future research of the study are outlined.

Date of Award	20 Apr 2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Kyryl Lakishyk (Supervisor)